2015: A year in review

As 2015 officially draws to a close, we take some time to chat with Francois Dussurget, CEO at Valiantys, to look back at the year that was…

What a year it’s been! Take us through some of your personal highlights…

2015 was truly a stand-out year for Valiantys.

While it’s hard to handpick specific highlights, one that immediately springs to mind is our launch of azanda ITSM, our ITIL-based starter kit built on Atlassian tools. This is the product of a huge amount of work across the team, and we’re delighted to be able to offer this solution to customers.

Then of course there was the announcement of Valiantys’ strategic alliance with Appfire. This is a really exciting collaboration that will hopefully see us grow our international reach even further in 2016 – especially into North America.

In October we held our Enterprise Days in both Paris and London. It was great to bring our customers together to share ideas, best practice and expertise, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, we’ve already set the wheels in motion for this year’s events!

Finally, we are very happy to have received four awards at this year’s Atlasssian Summit in November in San Francisco, including the top selling Atlassian award for Europe and the top selling award for JIRA Service Desk worldwide. This was a tremendous accolade for the whole team, and something we’re hugely proud of.

Where has customer demand been coming from this past year?

We’ve noticed increased demand in a number of areas, particularly in customers coming to us looking for Atlassian training and dedicated hosting.

More customers are getting in touch with large projects, particularly where they are looking to deploy Atlasssian tools outside of software development, as a more corporate solution. In fact, I think this has been one of the major evolutions we’ve seen in 2015, and this will be a major priority for us as we move into the New Year.

This also means we’ve been working on more wide-reaching global projects. While our focus at Valiantys has always been to ‘act local’, many projects we’re working on at a local level are being deployed internationally, which is really exciting for us.

What do you think is behind this demand?

I think it’s all about maturity – often once customers have deployed a new tool and have grown familiar with it, they start looking for ways to improve the way they use it. As mature Atlasssian experts, Valiantys are the natural choice to help them really optimise their Atlassian tools.

What do you see as the biggest challenge that Valiantys has faced in the past year?

Definitely scalability – it’s always a challenge for us to keep up with Atlassian’s continued growth. Similarly, as our customer base continues to grow it’s vital that we’re able to respond quickly and provide the right solutions. While this can be challenging, it also means that we have some really exciting plans in the pipeline for the year ahead.

How would you sum up 2015 in three words?

It’s not quite three words, but I’d say growth, enterprise and ‘think global, act local’ – all of which we hope to continue into 2016.

Stayed tuned for part two of this blog, where Francois will share his thoughts on what’s in store for the year ahead.